In the emerging digital home, consumers are acquiring, viewing and/or managing an increasing amount of digital content, particularly media content like photographs, music and video media. Consumers are increasingly acquiring, viewing and/or managing such content on devices in a number of different domains, including consumer electronics (CE), mobile device and personal computer (PC) device domains. In this regard, the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) has produced guidelines to ensure interoperability in home networks between devices in the CE, mobile device and PC device domains. Currently, the DLNA guidelines address fixed devices, such as set-top boxes (STBs), personal video recorders (PVRs), PCs, stereo and home theaters, which are generally static and not power-constrained. However, it is contemplated that future guidelines of the DLNA will also address handheld devices, such as mobile telephones, portable digital assistants (PDAs), pagers, laptop computers, which are generally mobile and power-constrained. Among the different wireless communication techniques, Bluetooth is generally accepted as one of the wireless communication techniques intended to be introduced in DLNA guidelines. And because of the increasing number of Bluetooth-enabled mobile terminals being introduced, Bluetooth is expected to be one of the more popular mobile communication options for mobile terminals in DLNA-compliant networks in the immediate future.
Generally, to connect to a DLNA-compliant network, a Bluetooth-enabled mobile terminal needs to connect via a Bluetooth access point, which bridges between the mobile-terminal domain and the DLNA-compliant network. In this regard, the DLNA is currently standardizing a Network Connectivity Function (NCF) that defines the functionality that should be implemented by DLNA-compliant Bluetooth access point. To provide the necessary support for the TCP/IP-layer suite over the Bluetooth link layer, both the mobile terminal and the NCF must typically support the Bluetooth personal area network (PAN) profile and the Bluetooth network encapsulation protocol (BNEP). For more information on the PAN profile and BNEP, see Bluetooth Special Interest Group, Personal Area Networking Profile, version 1.0 (February 2003); and Bluetooth Special Interest Group, Bluetooth Network Encapsulation Protocol, version 1.0 (February 2003), the contents of both of which are incorporated herein in its entirety.
Currently, when a mobile terminal is connected to a DLNA-compliant network across an access point in accordance with a wireless communication technique such as Bluetooth, an active connection (e.g., BNEP) is typically maintained between the mobile terminal and an NCF of the access point. Maintaining an active connection, however, typically results in an increase in power consumption of the mobile terminal, as compared to when the mobile terminal is not connected to the network. As will be appreciated, consumers would like to be able to use their mobile terminals to connect to DLNA-compliant networks without noticing a significant reduction in the battery duration of their devices. As such, it would be desirable to design a system, mobile terminal, access point and method of managing a mobile connection to a network to achieve power savings for the mobile terminal over conventional techniques.